Luis Carlos Prestes

Luis Carlos Prestes (3 January 1898-7 March 1990) was General-Secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party from 1943 to 1980 and a Senator for the Federal District from 1946 to 1948.

Biography
Luis Carlos Prestes was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil in 1898, and he took part in the failed peasant uprisings of the 1920s. While he was initially on good terms with Getulio Vargas, who donated money to Prestes' revolutionary cause, Prestes saw Vargas as a bourgeois revolutionary and instead turned to Marxism. Prestes became the leader of a coalition of socialists, communists, and other progressives opposed to Vargas' authoritarian regime, and, in 1935, Prestes' opposition movement was labelled as "subversive". That same year, Prestes was arrested and tortured, while his movement was violently suppressed. Prestes' German-Jewish wife was even deported to Nazi Germany, where she later died in a concentration camp. In 1945, Prestes and other political prisoners were released when Vargas abandoned fascism as the result of World War II, and Prestes became the leader of the Brazilian Communist Party, even serving as a Senator from 1946 to 1948. The party made a comeback during the democratization of the 1950s, but he was imprisoned when the military junta of 1964 cracked down on the communist movement. Prestes remained loyal to the Soviet Union during the Maoist schism, which formed the Communist Party of Brazil, and Prestes lived in exile in Moscow from 1970 to 1980, when he was amnestied. He returned to Brazil and renounced the Communist Party, but not Marxism, and he became a Democratic Labor Party of Brazil supporter. He died in 1990.